Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman Quotes

History is totally unpredictable.

How fragile and unpredictable the course of history is.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

History is full of times when the inevitable front-runner is inevitable right up until he or she is no longer inevitable.

The past guarantees you nothing in the future if the rules change.

You can never plan the future by the past.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

History is only a feeble light, for the rubrics were meant to answer future problems unimagined and unimaginable

The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace.

Predictions are so often, so wrong ... The future is just too complicated.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

It’s very hard to predict the weather. Predicting human affairs is very difficult.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

Nothing is inevitable in history.

I don't like to make predictions, because my life's been pretty unpredictable so far.

Foreseeing the future is always difficult.